Searching for Truth

How can you tell when he's lying? When his lips are moving...

Editorial writers have a right to their own opinions. However, as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, they do not have a right to their own facts. For many people, The Albany Herald is an important source of local, state and national news. The political pundits and the political cartoons that appear on The Herald’s editorial page are the place many local readers receive their analysis of the news-- on what’s behind the cold facts on the news pages. So it’s a disservice to readers any time The Herald’s editorial staff chooses to print columnists and cartoonists who shamelessly exaggerate, mislead, and occasionally outright lie about facts.

Instead of printing column after column from the likes of Rich Lowry and Cal Thomas, The Herald would be doing its readers a service by publishing fact checks of their prior columns where they stated as facts that global warming is a liberal myth, that weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaida existed in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before we invaded in 2003, or that everything was going swell in Iraq and the mainstream media somehow overlooked the incredible successes of the American occupation and focused on the few “dead-enders” who were in their “last throes.”

Maybe I’m being naive, but isn’t the purpose of a newspaper to help its readers find the truth?